Items tagged with ATI

AMD's fourth quarter results for 2012 are in, and they're as bad as everyone has been expecting. The only good news is that since everyone has been expecting it, the company's stock shouldn't take too hard a hammering. Total revenue for the year was $5.42B, down 17.5% year-on-year. Gross margins fell from 45% to 23% thanks to a much higher cost of sales. AMD ended 2012 with a $1.1B net loss, compared to a $486M income in 2011. Computing Solutions (CPU sales) revenue fell to $4B for the year, down from $5B in 2011. Graphics revenue was down 10% year-on-year, to $1.41B in sales, as opposed to $1.565B...Read more...

Gaming is something we've done quite a bit of over the years, but sitting down to pick a list of the most addictive games ever proved surprisingly tricky. Addictive games aren't necessarily the top sellers, or record-smashing behemoths. Sometimes, their appeal is measured in near-perfect execution of a narrow concept, while other games keep us up 'til 3 AM because, despite their flaws, they offer a compelling, challenging experience... Digital Obsession: The Most Addictive PC Games Ever...Read more...

Gaming is something we've done quite a bit of over the years, but sitting down to pick a list of the most addictive games ever proved surprisingly tricky. Addictive games aren't necessarily the top sellers, or record-smashing behemoths. Sometimes, their appeal is measured in near-perfect execution of a narrow concept, while other games keep us up 'til 3 AM because, despite their flaws, they offer a compelling, challenging experience. Orcs Must Die 2 has eaten more of my life than I want to admit in front of my employers. Here is our criteria: No mobile/pocket/Facebook games: I've...Read more...

Ever since the Wii U was announced, there've been conversations on the type of CPU it used and what sort of performance gamers could expect from it. Deep off-the-record comments from game developers indicated that the Wii U's horsepower was on par with, or perhaps a bit behind the Xbox 360 and PS3, which naturally raised questions about just how "next-generation" the Wii U would be. Now, Wii and PS3 hacker Hector Martin (aka Marcan) has answered some of these questions and raised a few others. According to him, the Wii U's CPU is a triple-core design clocked at 1.24GHz. Marcan identifies the base...Read more...

Grim tidings abound at AMD this quarter, confirming some of our worst fears and raising serious questions about the company's ability to continue as a going concern. Revenue for the quarter was $1.27 billion, a decrease of 10% sequentially and 25% year-on-year. The company reported a net loss of $157M and has announced a new restructuring (read: massive layoffs) plan. The company's gross margin plummeted to 31%, down from 45% last quarter. The decline in gross margin was driven by an inventory write-down on the value of the unsold hardware AMD was carrying at the end of Q2. Despite this, AMD's...Read more...

As of today, AMD has a new set of high-end professional GPUs available -- and a new shot at the professional GPU crown. It's a move the company hopes will allow it to take a greater share of the professional 3D business. AMD's battle against Nvidia in the professional graphics market is similar to the company's struggles against Intel ten years ago. In both cases, initial AMD gains have been partly reversed; Jon Peddie Research estimates that AMD now holds just 15% of the professional market, down from 18.4% six months ago. The new W9000 and W8000 cards we're reviewing today are replacements for...Read more...

As of today, AMD has a new set of high-end professional GPUs available -- and a new shot at the professional GPU crown. It's a move the company hopes will allow it to take a greater share of the professional 3D business. AMD's battle against Nvidia in the professional graphics market is similar to the company's struggles against Intel ten years ago. In both cases, initial AMD gains have been partly reversed; Jon Peddie Research estimates that AMD now holds just 15% of the professional market, down from 18.4% six months ago. Nvidia, meanwhile, has been largely idle. The company's high-end parts,...Read more...

For over 10 years, the desktop and mobile graphics space has been dominated by two players: Nvidia and AMD/ATI. After 3dfx collapsed, there was a brief period of time when it looked as though Imagination Technologies might establish itself as a third option. Ultimately, that didn't happen -- the company's tile-based rendering solution, Kyro, failed to gain much mass-market support and faded after two generations. Now, there's a flurry of evidence to suggest that Imagination Technologies plans to re-enter PC market, but from the opposite direction. Rather than building expensive discrete solutions,...Read more...

If you're a mobile gamer, today's announcement is pretty darn exciting. Ever since it unveiled its new Kepler architecture earlier this year, Nvidia has been talking up the GK104's improved performance/watt. It doesn't take much in the way of a clairvoyant talent to see how the new chip could kick mobile discrete GPU performance up a few notches, and based on what Nvidia has shown thus far, that's precisely what's happened. The new 680M series is designed to drive considerably higher performance than its predecessors. Comparative performance in 3DMark 11 Performance Preset Source -- Nvidia...Read more...

It's been six weeks since Eric Demers, AMD's CTO of graphics, left the company to pursue other opportunities, and another former ATI employee has followed his example. Godfrey Cheng, who recently served as one of AMD's Director of Client Technologies, has left the company. Cheng was part of AMD's high-profile Llano launch and reportedly chose to leave after it became clear that AMD wasn't going to follow Rick Bergman's ideas for how to best leverage AMD's graphics and APU assets. How much truth there is to that assertion is unclear. Bergman's departure was certainly surprising, but the slides AMD...Read more...

The FirePro V3900 is AMD's latest budget solution for the professional graphics market. We covered the card's launch last month. It's a formidable step up from the V3800 it replaces. Budget card launches may lack some of the excitement of high-end product debuts, but lower-end cards like the V3900 account for a significant percentage of AMD's total GPU sales. The V3900 is interesting for another reason -- it's AMD's latest salvo in its ongoing campaign to steal professional market share away from rival Nvidia. Workstation-class GPU sales are overwhelmingly dominated by Team Green, but AMD has slashed...Read more...

The FirePro V3900 is AMD's latest budget solution for the professional graphics market. We covered the card's launch last month; it's a formidable step up from the V3800 it replaces. Budget card launches may lack some of the excitement of high-end product debuts, but lower-end cards like the V3900 account for a significant percentage of AMD's total GPU sales. The V3900 is interesting for another reason -- it's AMD's latest salvo in its ongoing campaign to steal professional market share away from rival Nvidia. Workstation-class GPU sales are overwhelmingly dominated by Team Green, but AMD has slashed...Read more...

AVADirect announced that it now includes ATI HD 7770 and 7750 graphics cards in its product lineup. The company actually has quite a few; there are three 7750s (from ASUS, Gigabyte, and MSI) and no fewer than eight 7770s (from ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI, Sapphire, and XFX). AVADirect suggests that the although it’s offering the 7770 and 7750 as alternatives to the NVIDIA GTX 560 Ti and GTX 550 Ti cards, respectively, it doesn’t feel that the performance is exactly comparable and that the value should be measured in terms of dollar value for performance. But for “those on a tight budget,...Read more...

When AMD held its Analyst Day a few weeks ago, the company focused on how it was fundamentally changing its approach to semiconductor research and product development. Years of attempting to compete with Intel drained company coffers and exposed it to tremendous competitive pressure. Consumers unquestionably profited -- Intel's prices for various parts dropped dramatically in the early 2000s as AMD entered specific markets -- but Sunnyvale took a ferocious beating in the process. Forbes has published a major article on the company's turbulent last few years and current plans. It credits Dirk Meyer...Read more...